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Dear Reader, 

Anyone who was a teenager in the 80s or 90s understands the cultural importance of the fake ID. Social fortunes – nay, entire suburban empires – rose and fell based largely on who had the best fake ID, with all its attendant risks and rewards.

There was a hierarchy of sorts. The lowest form was the homemade ID where you’d stand in front of a foam core poster board crafted to resemble the design of a driver’s license, get a photograph taken of your own head in the bottom corner, laminate the photo, and then use silver spray paint and sandpaper to replicate the primitive hologram. (If you’re wondering how I know so much about this process, I would both take the Fifth and note that the statute of limitations has long run out.) The middle level was a real ID of somebody who was a few years older and preferably looked at least somewhat similar (ideally an older sibling). And then, the top of the pyramid, fake ID nirvana: get the birth certificate of some older person, go down to DMV, fill out the forms, and get a real ID issued with your actual photo but an earlier date of birth. 

A friend of mine once attempted to reach this highest level on the fake ID scale. (I know what you’re thinking; this actually was a friend, not a “friend” meaning me.) He got the birth certificate of an older guy in town and bravely (ok, stupidly) went down to the local DMV. He filled out the required forms and slid them across the desk, along with the birth certificate of the person he claimed to be. The clerk looked warily at the documents, told my friend “Hold on…” and then disappeared into the back office area. My friend, thinking fast – panicking, maybe – took off. He ran out of the DMV and into the scrubby wooded area behind the building to hide. The cops showed up, and he laid low in the brush for a few hours until they left. He later became a hero in the re-telling, as you can tell by my clear memory of his glorious foolishness, nearly 30 years later.

Here’s the point. Even my idiotic teenage friends and I had enough sense to know, decades ago, that it was illegal to submit false documents to a government agency. So: wouldn’t Rudy Giuliani, a former prosecutor who spent over 50 years practicing law, know that it’s illegal to create fake documents purporting to appoint bogus slates of electors in the 2020 election? My friend submitted his phony documents to the DMV to get a fake ID; Giuliani’s forged documents were submitted to the National Archives to steal the presidency.

Even in the steaming wreckage of Giuliani’s most outrageous plots, this particular gambit stands out for its brazen dishonesty, for its utter stupidity, and for its potential to wreak havoc on our democracy. When media accounts began to surface that a series of fake certificates, purportedly naming slates of “alternate electors” from seven different states, had been sent to the National Archives, one thing was immediately clear: this was a coordinated effort. There’s just no way that people in seven different states all simultaneously had the identical notion to draft up phony slates of electors. Somebody had to be running point. And in a deeply unsurprising revelation, that central schemer turned out to be… Rudy Giuliani.

Along with the news about Giuliani’s latest unhinged escapade came an important question: will anything really ever happen to Rudy? Or will he smirk and bluster his way off into infamy, unaccompanied by any meaningful criminal consequences? We know that Giuliani is in trouble on several fronts. His law license has been suspended in New York and DC because he lied his face off in court filings (generally, lawyers shouldn’t do that). He has been sued for millions for defaming voting technology companies and for sparking the January 6 Capitol attack. The Southern District of New York – the office that Giuliani once led (as an SDNY alum myself, I still have a hard time wrapping my head around this) – has executed a search warrant on Rudy’s home and office, and is investigating him for potential foreign lobbying crimes, unrelated to January 6.

This latest Giuliani scandal underscores just how vital it is that the Justice Department do its job here.  Earlier this week, in an exceedingly rare move, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco publicly confirmed that the Justice Department is investigating the fake elector certificate scheme. Even if federal prosecutors don’t care to wrestle with difficult questions about potential sedition or election interference charges, there are cleaner paths to address Giuliani’s conduct: it’s a federal crime to make material false statements to the government, and to attempt to obstruct Congress, for example. 

It’s easy to get numb to Giuliani. His transgressions have been so frequent, so ostentatious, so over-the-top that they all seem to run together. It can be difficult to recall them all, and to keep them straight. Remember when he prodded Trump to try to shake down the Ukrainian president? That little gambit earned Trump his first impeachment – which now somehow seems like forever and countless scandals ago, almost a footnote in the litany of Trump scandals.

Sometimes it seems like Giuliani’s own ridiculousness minimizes the threat he poses. It’s easy to shrug your shoulders and say, “There he goes again, Rudy being Rudy, sputtering and butt-dialing, brown makeup running down his face and hands in his pants. What a fool. Anyway, hey, what are you gonna do?” 

But Giuliani is something more, and more sinister, than that. Let’s not forget: if he had gotten his way, this country would have been thrown into chaos. And Giuliani did it in a desperate attempt to prop up Trump and to salvage his own last remaining shred of power and relevance. So, sure, Giuliani is a laughingstock and a buffoon. But don’t let his angry-clown visage distract from the danger he has created and helped to unleash. 

Stay Informed, 

Elie